The Life and Happenings around Blejoi Bridge

Wise men say that, at first look, that is, of someone completely entangled in the ferocious net of appearance, of the realm of flesh and dust, a stone is merely a stone. Then, for the person who starts waking up and feeling that, beyond the empirical, there may be Something else, a stone is no longer a stone. Finally, when the one that once was uninitiated gets to breathe the sweet air of the sur-visible meanings that, in fact, beacon us all – at that moment, a stone becomes once again a stone, exactly because its profound role was grasped.

Obviously now, a bridge is by no means a stone and, regarding yours truly, he himself is not quite sure as to what extent he can be said to walk on the path of becoming a better man. If at all. But, you see, take the Blejoi railroad bridge, which only stray trains rarely crawl across today: its feet are really made of stone. And, secondly, although I have been crossing it (and the car bridge nearby) for all my life, it is only recently that I began realizing that there is a lot more to this seemingly prosaic bridge and its surroundings than one might think.

Indeed, should you let yourself wander aimlessly on it, or around it, on one of the banks of Teleajen river, or even under it, taking advantage, if such be the case, of the road that comes down from the main one and parallels the river for a short while, you risk to be, statistically speaking, completely disappointed. Even more, you might feel quite put out and scorch-mouthed by the drought periods in which nothing happens, by the periods of long, profane standstill, so to speak.

But, from time to time and almost out of the blue, bursts of magical time flood everything with their translucent light. Men and bicycles, birds, dogs and horses – not to mention the fish in the water –, children playing or going to school, adults heading for work past the deserted watchman’s cabin, fishermen, old people minding their own or someone else’s business, solitary or in groups, some in high spirits, some not, only rarely annoyed by the photographer lurking around – all of them become, suddenly, actors in a mysterious play they don’t even know they’re in, yet a play by no means less real, which the author of these lines can but strive to note using the camera hung by his neck.

For, it is true, this camera clicked only when it felt those moments that ascend, from the apparent, towards the essence, out of the empirical, to powers that be, from denotation, to metaphor. So, since things above start right from the ground, then metaphors are, or can be, a ladder. And a ladder, as we all know, is simply something like a bridge, a bridge standing up. Something like a bridge, a bridge that has just risen from the dead.